SQL Server 2000 Continues Microsoft’s Enterprise Push

SQL Server
2000 is Microsoft Corp.’s latest version of its flagship relational database
management system offering. The long awaited follow-up to SQL Server 7.0 was
released to manufacturing on August 7.

While SQL
Server will continue in its role as the anchor of the BackOffice suite in
smaller businesses, Microsoft made enhancements in SQL Server 2000 to push
further into competition with Oracle and IBM for large database accounts, a
move the company started with SQL Server 7.0.

After SQL
Server 6.5 came out, the RDBMS underwent a radical code redesign and the
product that emerged from it is what we know now as version 7.0. While SQL
Server 2000 -- originally known by the codename “Shiloh” -- has not gone
through such a noticeable revamp, Microsoft’s present offering does include
major changes.

Much of the
buzz on SQL Server 2000 surrounds its new XML capabilities. The product can now
get XML messages out of relational data, provide XML views to relational data
tables, provide relational data views on XML data, and offers XML updating.
Since SQL Server 2000 is such a big part of Microsoft’s e-commerce strategy and
.NET, it will also feature support for the BizTalk XML framework, as well as
for the BizTalk Server 2000.

Looking to simplify the data mining and OLAP
process, Microsoft has integrated those services with the database – these will
now be known as Analysis Services.The
company also wanted to improve the product’s overall ease of use. To do that,
Microsoft added multi-instancing of the database, and full-text search and
English query features.

SQL Server
2000 is also offering a slew of other newbies, including a core relational
engine, core storage engine, replication, and data mining.

Microsoft also
introduced a controversial scalability clustering mechanism in SQL Server 2000
called Distributed Partition Views. The feature allows very large databases to
be built in pieces on a number of standard servers.

Microsoft
leapfrogged to the head of the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s
OLTP benchmark (www.tpc.org) using the
technique on beta code of SQL Server 2000. While the results were later
recalled on a technicality, Microsoft rewrote the code to address the concerns
and reposted its results. Some industry observers contend the distributed
approach is an overly complex method for building large databases that
real-world database administrators would not use.

Users can
also look for large and smaller versions of the database in the months to come.
Microsoft is working on SQL Server 2000 version for 64-bit computing and one
for Windows CE. – Alicia Costanza